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Tuesday, 30 September 2008

How House - Rudolph Schindler

Another beauty by Viennese-Californian architect Rudolph Schindler, from 1925 when he first settled in California, in that marvelously creative period between the wars when he helped define the best of Californian 'modernism' -- which said modernists were mostly too dim to appreciate. Said Schindler in a letter to the Museum of Modern Art in 1943,

I consider myself the first and still one of the few architects who consciously abandoned stylistic sculptural architecture in order to develop space as a medium of art. ... I believe that outside of Frank Lloyd Wright I am the only architect in U.S. who has attained a distinct local and personal form language.

And so he had. Frank Lloyd Wright, never one to overpraise a colleague, allowed in references that Schindler "has built quite a number of buildings in and around Los Angeles that seem to be admirable from the standpoint of design, and I have not heard of any of them falling down... He has a good mind, is affectionate in disposition, and is fairly honorable I believe. Personally, though strongly individual, he is not unduly eccentric and I, in common with many others, like him very much."

The How House sits on top of a steep ridge, angled to the street, with a gorgeous view of the Los Angeles River. It is one of the best examples of Schindler’s use of geometry and proportion in order to manipulate space. The main volume of the house is shaped as a cube with smaller spaces extending out from it.

5 comments:

Sort of relevant. Did you see a tv programme the other night about this architect building a house in South London on a tiny patch of wasteland? He had a motorised sliding windowed roof; then another curved roof made from layers of ply similar to a boat hull; A bath that mechanically rolled out from under a bed. It was fascinating and I thought the inside space he created was very liveable.

I live down the street from this house and am so thrilled to finally see pictures of the interior! It is one of those rare homes that takes my breath away. I can only imagine what it would be like to inhabit that space.

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